Hargrave Hobble

BingBongLong suggested we go out and have a pop at a series called the Hargrave Hobble, which is around, funnily enough, the village of Hargrave up in the triangle of confusion where you can’t tell whether you’re in Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire or Cambridgeshire. Hargrave is just in Northants, but the walking took us into Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire as well.

We started off by grabbing a YOSM just outside Raunds and then parked up in Hargrave for the main event. We walked round in numbered sequence, which meant anticlockwise. When you get around to #33 we made the choice to not attempt to do the whole series in one walk – it would have been too far round for the light we’d got left, so we ducked back into the village there, missing out on #34 to #38.

From there we did a few in the car, including #52 to #54, and then parked up around #42 to walk over the fields through a wind farm, completing #42 through #47. From there we drove a stretch of road nearby to complete #41 throuh #39 in reverse order. For some reason there are two #41s and two #14s.

At this point we’d got a small amount of light left and had heard of a challenge cache that required the completion of church micros in three different counties on the same day. So far we’d done Hargrave in Northamptonshire and Covington in Cambridgeshire. There was a tempting and easy looking pair of church micros in Swineshead in Bedfordshire, so we finished our day by hitting those two. In all we’d found 55 caches, which is pretty good for a February day with a mid-morning start.